Stanford Health Care put a wearable mixed reality headset into a working cardiac electrophysiology lab as a reconfigurable stand-in for the wall of physical monitors that surrounds an ablation. In late February 2024, with the patient's informed consent, cardiac electrophysiologist Alexander Perino, MD, wore the headset throughout an atrial fibrillation ablation at Stanford Hospital in Stanford, California. Stanford Medicine described the team as among the first to integrate an augmented reality tool of this kind into surgical practice.
An ablation is guided by several simultaneous live data streams: a real-time, anatomically accurate representation of the patient's heart and of the catheter being used to treat the tissue causing the arrhythmia, plus ultrasound images, X-ray imaging and the patient's vital signs. Perino says there can be up to eight such screens, and an operating room rarely has the space to place them all where the operator can comfortably see them. On conventional systems the operator also cannot manipulate the data directly, so a staff member has to do it for them.
The headset receives those feeds as secured real-time data from a workstation and presents them as virtual monitors positioned around the room. The wearer can still see the patient and the operating room as normal. Eye tracking tells the system where his attention is, and a pinch of the fingers or a quick hand movement lets him zoom into a stream, enlarge a monitor or move it to a more ergonomic position without asking anyone for help.
The deployment was deliberately additive rather than a substitution. The conventional monitors stayed in place, and the surgical team watched a mirror of what Perino was seeing through the headset on ordinary screens. Stanford Health Care's biomedical engineering and health information technology teams, part of Stanford Medicine's Technology and Digital Solutions group, adapted the off-the-shelf device for the hospital's interventional platform.
Stanford has kept presenting the work rather than shelving it: the Department of Medicine's 2025 annual report and a video published on the department's own channel in October 2025 describe the same setup, and clinicians there are exploring whether the three-dimensional heart model could be registered onto the patient's body itself, and whether the system could serve education and training. Stanford has not reported a wider rollout, a second site, or a count of subsequent procedures, so the record stands as a pilot.
